Surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices have been studied and gradually commercialised since the mid 1960s. Such devices typically have electrodes in the form of interlocked “fingers” (so-called inter-digital electrodes) formed on a piezoelectric substrate. When high frequency signals are applied to the input electrodes, mechanical vibrations in the form of travelling acoustic waves are generated in the piezoelectric substrate which are picked up by the output electrodes. Generally speaking, when the wavelength of the surface acoustic waves and the period of the electrode “fingers” are the same, the magnitude of the surface acoustic waves are at their greatest and the device has a low electrical impedance. The frequency band at which the impedance is low defines the “pass band”. At other input frequencies, outside the pass band, the device appears to have a higher electrical impedance.
Thus, a so-called “SAW resonator filter” can be made to have a very precise and narrow (typically having a Q factor over 1000), band pass characteristic. Furthermore, since surface acoustic waves travel across the substrate 100000 times more slowly than the speed of electromagnetic waves, such devices are generally compact and implemented on a single die. In practice, such devices can be used in a ladder configuration (with a plurality of shunt and plurality of series resonator filters used together). This allows a combined band pass characteristic to be tuned as desired.
These types of devices have found many uses, but suffer from two significant disadvantages which prevent their use in some applications. Firstly, band pass filters produced using SAW resonators typically have relatively high insertion losses typically of a minimum of 1 or 2 dB. The state of the art presently is an insertion loss of about 1 dB in the pass band with a rejection of about 15 dB in the stop band for a single stage band pass ladder filter. The losses typically occur as a result of visco-elastic attenuations and/or mode conversions from SAW to bulk acoustic waves when the electrical energy is converted to acoustic energy and travels around the SAW filter cavity. Secondly, the power handling capability of SAW filters is limited. At high powers, the ultrasonic vibration to which the metallic electrodes are subjected eventually causes the metal grain boundaries to migrate. Thus, for example, at the present 1800, 1900 and 2100 MHz mobile communication bands, such filters are barely able to withstand the typical transmit powers of 500 mW to 1 W for the typical life of a handset. Furthermore, to achieve this modest power handling capability, very advanced material systems have been developed.
SAW band reject filters potentially offer a way forward. In a band reject filter, the magnitude of the impedance is greatest at the rejection frequency band. At other input frequencies, the pass band, the device has a low electrical impedance. Since a SAW band reject filter can be designed to behave as an interdigital transducer (IDT) capacitive element within its pass band, and only exhibit a strong acoustic response within its rejection band, it is possible for these filters to achieve very low insertion losses and handle significantly larger powers than corresponding band pass filters. At frequencies away from the rejection band (i.e. at the device's pass band) the acoustic response of the device is very weak and as such viscoelastic attenuation or acoustic mode conversions is very minimal and the attainable insertion loss is primarily limited by the Q of the few matching components and the IDT capacitor (SAW transducer). Furthermore, acousto-electric migration is no longer as significant an issue and hence the device is able to handle much more power and is primarily only limited by arcing across the IDT's. Despite the tremendous potential of SAW notch and band reject filters, relatively little work has been done on them to date.
C. S. Hartman produced some of the first publications on SAW notch filters, including U.S. Pat. No. 4,577,168, that issued Mar. 18, 1986, and C. S. Hartman, J. C. Andle and M. B. King “SAW Notch Filters,” Proc. 1987 Ultrasonics Symposium, Vol. 1, pp. 131-138. Various techniques for implementing SAW notch filters were presented where the conductance within the pass band of a single-phase unidirectional transducer (SPUDT) was used as an impedance element to create a notch filter. One implementation employed the impedance of the SPUDT transducer in conjunction with a Radio Frequency (RF) transformer and other implementations replaced the capacitors in a bridge-T type notch filter with a SPUDT transducer impedance element.
A variation on this technique was presented in 1990 by Gopani et al. (S. Gopani and B. A. Horine “SAW Waveguide-Coupled Resonator Notch Filter” Ultrasonics Symposium, 1990), where a Two-Pole Waveguide Coupled Resonator was imbedded in an all pass network to implement a notch filter. A further modification was presented by Lorenz et al. in 1998 (P. A. Lorenz and D. F. Thompson, “Wide Bandwidth Low Cost SAW Notch Filters”, Ultrasonics Symposium, 1998). This technique consisted of placing two single pole SAW resonators in series with a shunt inductor in between them to resonate out their static capacitances.
Leveraging the inherent advantages of band reject filters, the present inventors developed a band reject filter based on a SAW ladder filter (U.S. Pat. No. 6,710,677, issued Mar. 23, 2004, and S. Beaudin, C. Y. Jian and S. Sychaleun “A New SAW Band Reject Filter and its Applications in Wireless Systems”, Ultrasonics Symposium, 2002). The design technique for this previous SAW band reject filter was based on the reverse of the very well known band pass ladder filter of Y. Sato, O. Ikata, T. Matsuda, T. Nishihara and T. Miyashita “Resonator-Type Low-Loss Filters,” Proc. Int. Symp. SAW Devices for Mobile Comm., pp. 179-185, 1992.
In a band pass structure, one seeks to generate a pass band using the resonance of the series resonator and the anti-resonance of the shunt resonator. The insertion loss can be minimized by providing a very low series impedance and a very high shunt impedance. The inventors' previous band reject filter consisted primarily of generating a band reject filter by using the anti-resonance of the series resonator and the resonance of the shunt resonator where the depth of the rejection band was maximized by increasing the series impedance and minimizing the shunt impedance. For the well known pass band device, one seeks to optimize out of band rejection by minimizing the ratio of the series to shunt static capacitances. For the inventors' previous band reject filter, the opposite was true in that the inventors sought to minimize insertion loss by maximizing the ratio of the series to shunt static capacitances. It was noted that one can transform a pass band ladder filter into a corresponding band reject ladder filter very simply by inverting the shunt and series resonators in each arm of the ladder filter.
The resultant band reject filter was shown to provide very low insertion losses as well as being able to withstand substantially higher powers within its pass band. For example, some prototypes at 800 MHz have less than 0.5 dB of insertion loss in their pass band, provide >35 dB rejection in a rejection band and have withstood RF powers of 42 dBm for several weeks within their pass bands. The power handling capability is a full order of magnitude improved compared to a similar pass band SAW ladder filter of similar size.
Although filters of this type exhibit very low losses and high power handling capabilities, the design approach lacks flexibility where complex filter responses are desired. In order to generate a deep rejection band it is necessary to have a low impedance to ground working against a high series impedance. Both series and shunt resonators are used. The shunt resonator is used to generate a low RF impedance to ground at its resonance frequency and the anti-resonance of a series resonator is used to generate the high series impedance. Furthermore, to minimize loss in the pass band it is necessary to minimize the capacitance of the shunt resonator and maximize the capacitance of the series resonator, which introduce constraints on the resonator design. These filters are also generally intended for applications in which all filter components are in close proximity to each other, whereas many modern high frequency RF and microwave devices in which band reject filters could potentially be implemented often use distributed elements.